Apple TV+Jon Hamm excels in Apple TV+’s “emotionally real but absurdist” drama about a desperate corporate man who resorts to stealing from his neighbours.
Jon Hamm has his best role since Mad Men and brings all his sharp comic timing and dramatic nuance to it as Andrew Cooper, known as Coop, a hedge-fund manager who loses his job and manoeuvres to maintain his elaborate lifestyle and sense of himself. If you took Don Draper and dropped him into 2025 he might be Coop, a corporate man with a broken marriage and two teenaged children, a decent guy and a charmer with all-around bad judgement. Your Friends and Neighbors is emotionally real and affecting but also absurdist and funny, a rare combination.
The show begins with Coop waking up in a pool of blood next to a man’s dead body in the foyer of a neighbour’s mansion. He cleans up the blood – a bad move – and in one of the many mordant voiceovers that run through the series, looks back four months to reflect on “the swirling hot mess of my life”. His worst choice is replacing his lost income by stealing loot from friends so rich they’ll never miss it. The robberies are the comic vein in the story, but also a Trojan horse for its drama. Coop is hurt and distraught over the loss of his marriage, but that theme exists next to the caper-like thefts. The series is edgier and smarter than its entertaining surface suggests, as it deftly takes on issues of family, class privilege, vapid materialism and toxic masculinity.
Like most series, this could start a bit faster, as it sets up the life Coop is accustomed to in a suburban New York community of huge houses and country clubs, where $200,000 cars and $60,000 donations to charity are ordinary. That was his life until he found his wife Mel (Amanda Peet) in bed with his so-called friend, Nick (Mark Tallman), a former basketball star still in great shape. The divorce has sent Coop out of his expansive home into a smaller rental house nearby.
But soon enough the first episode gets to its boldest turn as we see why Coop lost his job. A woman who works at his firm, whom he has never met and who doesn’t report to him, comes on to him in a bar. Months later, that consensual hookup leads to his being fired for violating the company’s HR rules. Pop culture has at times gingerly dipped a toe into the theme of sexual harassment. On The Morning Show, Steve Carell’s character, a toxic predator, was sent off a cliff to die. But there has been nothing as complicated as this. The show doesn’t deny Coop’s bad judgement but also makes it clear through the woman herself and Coop’s ruthless boss that the HR rule was a convenient excuse to get rid of him while keeping his clients. The show doesn’t go far beyond that in exploring the issue, but it sets up the series’ complex realism about social standards.
A non-compete clause makes Coop unhireable, but he insists on keeping up appearances. His burglaries are treated like adventures, punctuated by mock ads as he describes the luxury items he’s lifting, with voiceovers that slyly echo Hamm’s in all those Mercedes-Benz commercials. “The Patek Phillippe Nautilus: sealed 18-carat white gold…” Coop says, talking about an item no one really needs.
The series’ real strength, though, is in his relationships, most of them driven by his wounded pride, and the way his identity has been tied to his role as a successful man of the world. Hamm smoothly navigates the shifts in tone, never allowing the humour to flag while letting us see the emotional pain Coop won’t reveal to anyone around him. There is a lot of residual affection between Coop and his cheating ex-wife, whom Peet manages to make sympathetic. When Mel worries and asks him what’s wrong, he displays a classic alpha-male inability to share feelings. “I’m fine,” he tells her when clearly he is not. Olivia Munn has less to do as Sam, a divorced neighbour and Coop’s occasional fling. And Lena Hall is brilliant as Coop’s sister, Ali. Briefly off her meds, she stalks her ex-fiancé, sitting on his lawn with her guitar and singing. Hall, who won a Tony for her role in the Broadway revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in 2014, sings occasionally through the series – an asset, not an intrusion. She makes Ali empathetic, funny and warm, and the bond between the brother and sister is touching. After she is back on her meds, her romantic subplot suggests that theirs really is a family full of bad choices.
A second season of the show has already been ordered, so the question of whether Coop will pay for his crimes will linger. That plot is an effective hook, but his resonant feelings and increasing self-knowledge set the show apart. At a party of male friends hosted by Nick – why is Coop even there? more bad choices – he looks around at the men who still have their jobs and money, and sees the person he might have become. “Their future was already written, and so the quest to stave off the emptiness began,” he says in voiceover, observing their devotion to “Scotch and cigars”, to “custom golf clubs and high-end escorts”. He recognises that there are “entire industries built to cash in on the quiet desperation of rich middle-aged men”. By even acknowledging that desperation, through a hero who is sympathetic – however wrong-headed his path to self-awareness – Your Friends and Neighbors is radically different from any other show around.
Your Friends and Neighbors is on Apple TV+ from 11 April.
